Milieu - Watch the Head (2023)

"One dreams in fire and works in clay."
-Arthur Machen, 1922

'Watch the Head' is the kind of album that, to me, comes on more like a season - a once or twice a year itch that I feel compelled to scratch, feeling like the generative modular work I tend toward more and more has again led me, perhaps predictably, to something composed and programmed.

It's a bit humorous to me to think that all of my music was made this way, in the earlier years, and I think I can draw a line around 'Sun Cast' as the moment where I realized that heavily composed work was now going to become something so exhausting and absolute that I could only really bear to do it once or twice in a calendar year. As I get older, I have realized that I am more than content to spend most of my time alone at sea, and in times like these, I feel called back to land, to civilization, to communion - but I always return to the unreachable horizon line beyond the sunny waves.

The albums that have followed that tack have slowly become more planned and plotted, refined and directed, and last year's 'The Flower to Disappear' felt very much to me like "phase two" of this approach to record making, where I'd set aside months of the year to devote almost completely to making *one* album, vacating the modular patch forests and generative curiosities to actually put pen to paper and *say* something again.

So, what is it that I wish to say? Having just turned forty a few months ago, I can unironically tell you that I don't think I've got much to say that I haven't said somewhere else before. 'Watch the Head' is not the best album I've ever made, nor does it strive to be (and certainly "best" is a rare word for me in these last few years, as I greatly dislike quantifying in absolutes), but it is the best album I can make right now. This is, as the I Ching might say, sufficient. "Close enough for government work" as the Brian of five or ten years ago would have said with a smirk.

I think, for this push on the swing, the things I wish to say are not necessarily to you, Constant Listener, but to myself, albeit in the presence of friends who I feel have come to understand me and accept me. That would be you, any and all of you who have paid for a Milieu or CH album even once since 2005 - the fact that you've encouraged all of this has affected my decision to *continue* to do it, but after years of laboring over things, chasing tangents and reorienting myself, I've had a lot of time to consider what this act of expression really means to me.

I've found that, generally, music that has been fashioned as something representative of where my mind is at a given point in time tends to succumb to an inevitable erosion of clarity - that given enough time, it simply becomes an object or a time capsule perhaps, and I think this is where and how I end up revisiting the process, trying to find myself inside it all over again - trying to excavate the statue from the stone.

This approach is a bit comedic, inherently, because I'll probably never get to some plateau point in my work where I feel that my work is finished, that I've built this monument and everything I feel is bound up within it. Instead, I am constantly falling behind myself, trying to catch up and perhaps outrun my work a little bit, and each time I feel that I've exhausted all my curiosity and made the best possible recording I can make, there's an inescapable sense that I'll always be back again, taping over what came before, defining the new definitive.

So here we are, together again at a branch in the path. It's always the same as before, and never the same, and if either of those statements were completely true, I question whether or not either of us would continue to care. There must be a feeling that something can be "mostly true" that we both understand, and we can feel it running through these tracks as surely as the path we're walking. Whether or not we can ever really be sure is just another thing to wonder about, but for now, let's laugh and enjoy each other's company while we can. I'm glad that you're you, and I feel content with being me, at least in this moment.